Aspects of the present disclosure relate generally to wireless communications, and more particularly to cloud based radio access networks.
In traditional radio access networks (TRAN), L2/L1 functions of the RAN are implemented in a node called base station or eNodeB. The base station is generally connected to a core network through an IP transport backhaul, which is typically a wired connection. The base stations are also connected to each other for mobility management purposes.
In a distributed base station architecture, a radio frequency (RF) processing unit is co-located with a baseband unit in the base station. This may result in power inefficiencies because of losses over the cables to the antennas. This problem may be tackled by placing the RF processing unit close to the antennas. However, this requires a high bandwidth (for example, Gbps) short cable to transport baseband samples from the baseband unit to the RF processing unit.
In traditional cloud based radio access networks (CRAN), the baseband processing may be performed by a pool of processors in the cloud and the samples are transported to the RF processing units over long distances (for example, in the order of 40 km) optical backhauls. However, this requires high bandwidth and low latency backhaul which are very expensive to build and manage for network operators.
Therefore, there is a desire for a method and an apparatus for optimizing cloud based radio access network.